Get Involved in Product Development

Every day we face decisions and problems that come up during the product development process. We've learned that we can make better decisions faster by inviting the coffee community to be involved in every step of the product development process.

You can submit concept ideas for new products, give feedback on features and possible solutions, compete in design competitions and contribute by sharing your opinion every step along the way.

At each phase your contributions will have an impact and help make decisions that will influence the final product.

See Your Ideas Come To Life

From early renderings and pictures of 3D printed prototypes to engineering challenges, we share everything that happens behind the scenes with Team Handground.

Our goal is to involve you in the experience of product development from it's earliest stages and learn how we can improve and accelerate the product development process.

Each product cycle involves hundreds of decisions and can last a year but there is no feeling like using the product you created as a part of your morning coffee ritual.

COMMUNITY STATS

TEAM MEMBERS

5719

COUNTRIES

92

CONTRIBUTIONS

57,849

SURVEYS

31

PROCESS

Research

In the research phase we try to discover what the biggest pains in the community are and creative ways to solve them. Share stories of your biggest frustration with existing coffee equipment or ideas for completely new products. During this stage we test new concepts with simple prototypes to validate their function.

You can also contribute by answering questions about your daily coffee routine and give your opinion on where the biggest opportunities are.

Product Concept

Once we have an idea of what problem the new product will solve we need to evaluate the tradeoffs between features, material and aesthetics. The goal is to determine what constraints need to be considered when creating a concept design such as manufacturing capabilities, material selection, cost etc.

With the constraints outlined a design brief is formed for a design competition. We invite thousands of industrial designers to create concept renderings based on the design brief. You can give feedback to the designers during the competition to help them refine their designs. Once the finalists are selected, Team Handground chooses the winning concept.

Prototyping

With a design concept, feature list and known constraints in place our engineering team can begin the design for manufacturing process. This starts by breaking apart the overall design into individual components that can be manufactured at a high volume.

We use 3D printing to quickly prototype and test the design. Problems are inevitable and when something breaks, we will ask for your help to fix it.

Crowdfunding

We've created a concept product that we all love, now we need to raise the capital to bring it to life. There is a lot that goes into launching a crowdfunding campaign. We will need your help designing the video, campaign page and reward levels and spreading the word about the new product before the campaign launches.

You will be the first to know the exact time that the campaign will launch so you can claim a reward at early bird pricing.

Manufacturing

If the crowdfunding campaign is successful, the manufacturing phase will begin. Our manufacturing partner, Platform88, will perform a final design for manufacturing analysis and then begin creating the tooling that is used for final production.

After a pilot run to calibrate the tools, production will begin and your new creation will be on it's way to your front door.

PAST PROJECTS

Precision Coffee Grinder

Our first project, Handground, is the result of thousands of coffee enthusiasts around the world contributing their time and ideas. From home brewers to national barista champions, people from all corners of the world have leant lifetimes of experience with coffee.

The power of this experience shines through in the design of the Handground coffee grinder. It took hundreds of iterations and incremental improvements to get to the final design and there is no other way it could have been done without the help of Team Handground.

Handground Coffee Ink T-Shirt

This shirt was created as a backer reward for the Handground Kickstarter campaign. Team Handground determined the concept of filling in the outline of Handground with coffee related words or images and then we launched a design competition on 99designs.

The other unique aspect of this shirt is that it is printed with ink made from spent coffee grounds gathered from a roaster in San Diego.